Often breathtaking, Regier’s poetry always remains rooted in our most common vernacular—without pretense, yet in no way pedestrian. Out of ordinary subjects he creates magical stories that unfold in the most familiar spaces: the street, our beds, a motel in the countryside.
—Michael Hafftka

Three Years from Upstate is an exhilarating epic of story-poems. Compelling tales richly infested with free-falling images, Regier's book enacts a world of beggar-kings and philosophical ideas dropped as quickly as words from mouths. Three Years doesn't fit pre-existing conversations, but wants to provoke a new discussion, with a gambit of poetry startled by storytelling.
—Thalia Field

Six Gallery Press is pleased to announce the release of Three Years from Upstate, a book of poetry fascinated by the epic strain of John Milton and the romances of William Shakespeare.

Born in Indiana, Jonathan Regier has lived most of his life in New York State, in the city and the country. He currently resides in Paris, France.Back to Top

Six Gallery Press is pleased to announce the release of Peter Klappert’s 1975 collection of poems Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, available again for the first time in two decades. In this collection, the artist Michael Hafftka created a new drawing for each of the poems. In twenty tightly wound, intensely inward poems, Circular Stairs explores relationships of self and Shadow, ego and inner antagonist, creator and created. Compared with much of Klappert’s other work, the poems here are spare, elegiac, and by turns, lyric, narrative and dramatic.In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake says, “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence.” In this collection the psyche often finds itself imprisoned in tension-filled stasis, struggling to progress.
Michael Hafftka responds to each poem with a drawing expressing his relationship with the work. The linguistic and psychological subtlety of the poems inspires the nervous and enigmatic intensity of the drawings, transforming the emotional into the figurative."The darkness of Klappert's work is never simplistically pessimistic or cynical.... [He] recognizes that to be fully human—aware of one's own potentialities for good and evil, capable of real relationships with others, and at home in one's environment—is an intensely difficult task, one at which we are apt—both as individuals and as a society—to fail."—Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since 1945Peter Klappert is the author of six collections of poems, including Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket(Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1971), The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) and Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems 1966-1999(Orchises, 2000). He has taught at Rollins College, Harvard University, New College (Florida), The College of William and Mary and George Mason University.Michael Hafftka is a visual artist represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the MoMA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and other public and private collections. He has had one-man shows at numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Together Klappert and Hafftka have created a unique and beautiful collaboration with interplay between the poetically verbal and visual.Back to Top

Betrayal destroyed all trust, all security, and one cannot go forwards or backwards. All is pain and darkness in that space. The room is the person, is the writer, is the artist, and then it is the reader. Deception and rape are the violations of trust that produce the pain in the room in which the author and the artist find themselves. One suffers alone and the reader that picks up this book is a witness to the pain of betrayal that is otherwise indefinable.
—From the Introduction by Michael HafftkaSix Gallery Press is pleased to announce the release of West Virginia, a novel written by Che Elias with drawings by Michael Hafftka. This is their second collaboration after the critically well-received underground novel The Terror of Loch Ness. West Virginia is a nihilistic vision of betrayal and desperation set in the innermost reaches of the narrators mind.Che Elias was born in 1980 in Glendale, West Virginia. He spent his formative years in the surrounding Ohio River Valley area, then relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is currently living. He is the author of the novels Rockets Construe Vala, Juliet... Remember, The Pagan Ellipsis, The Abacus, and the poetry collections A Lesser Summer: Early Poems, Meddles into Preclusion, Wheeling (Poems and Stories), and Death Poems.Michael Hafftka was born in NYC in 1953. His books Michael Hafftka – Selected Drawings, 1982, and Art of Experience – Experience of Art, 1981, were published by Guignol Books, Tivoli, NY. Conscious/Unconscious, a collection of stories, is published by Six Gallery Press. Hafftka has had one-person shows in New York City since 1982 with Art Galaxy, Rosa Esman Gallery, DiLaurenti Gallery, Mary Ryan Gallery and Aberbach Fine Art. His work has been shown in the US and abroad in numerous museums. Hafftka’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA NY, The National Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco MOMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art.Hafftka’s work has been the subject of critical monographs by Sam Hunter, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Princeton University, John Caldwell, Curator at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the novelist Michael Brodsky. Hafftka’s work can be seen online at www.hafftka.com.Back to Top

"Some of the poems in this collection bring surrealistic paintings to mind deliberately, I imagine, as the grotesque imaginings seem to represent the current adult world today, as in the poem "Out of Burnt Skins", where Hafftka writes:"I rise out of burnt skins
Not a boy, not a girl,
Into a confused world ofAching men and wasted women."
And these images are contrasted with Hafftka’s other poems which express the yearning for the beauty and simplicity of remembered childhood:
"Let me go
To the womb’s cave
Deeper and closer,
Down the steps, the walls
Covered with gardens I wish I owned."
The overlay of melancholy extends to her philosophical poems as well, which concern the reflections of those in their forties who are beginning to assess their lives:
"Mannerism has as strong a hold at fortyAs need had in the days of dependency."The rueful attitude is also apparent in the wise observation that "Advice accentuates lack of sympathy." Her perception combined with a sensitive longing for the ideal gives her poetry substance.

Eleanor Ehrenkranz is a professor at Pace University, teaching writing courses. She got her PH.D at NYU. She has published articles in The New York Times, World Jewish Digest and The Greenwich Times, among other places.Back to Top

A veteran avant-garde novelist, playwright and translator of Beckett's Eleutheria, Brodsky (Detour) resurfaces with this beguiling collection of two novellas, one short story and three short-shorts. The title novella, which opens the collection, is written in that trickiest of forms, the second person (“you feel excluded, snubbed, far more than you've ever been, ever allowed yourself to be”), and follows the Beckettian peregrinations of Goodis (“you, Goodis!”) as he steals an overcoat, sits in a noirish diner and falls in with a low-end criminal gang, all the while commenting feverishly on what he sees: “Among the trashcans that divvy up the eft-head glimmer of an expiring streetlamp, you choose the biggest one to hide behind.” The second novella, “Midtown Pythagoras,” closes the book and is a similarly noirish, and very funny, play on detective fiction; a writer hires a private dick to strong-arm a reviewer into changing her views of the writer's work: “if I could make her vision of him coincide with his own then at last all would be well with his posterities.” All the work here is drenched in a weary angst, but Brodsky's joyful relief in writing—despite uncertain posterities—comes through on every page. Back to Top

by Joseph DeweyMidway through Michael Hafftka's weirdly alluring matrix of episodic narratives (I hesitate to call them short stories as they defy virtually every assumption of the genre with hip audacity and confident savvy), our narrator finds himself wrestling with a particularly nasty porcupine, its savage pelt of prickly quills ever threatening, until, in the logic appropriate to a dream, he understands that now he must strangle the porcupine, does so, and then slips gratefully into a heavy sleep. Across fifty-six such vignettes, which exist tenuously between memory and dream and move with a kind of associational logic, Hafftka, an accomplished neo-expressionist artist for the past thirty years, catapults us, with this collection, his first venture with narrative, into a fairytale world of Jungian imagery charged with Freudian implication, a symbolic landscape of winding staircases, stone towers, lush fields, quaint cottages, and forbidding forests. With Alice-like temerity, the narrator moves about the dreamscape, his journey recorded in flatline prose delivered without exclamation even as the narrator meets one after another mysterious, inexplicably threatening eccentrics who are distorted by carnal itches and/or by unspecified emotional woundings. We share these confrontations with the narrator/artist who comes to reveal an evolving complex persona struggling with the unsettling implications of a series of irresolvable contemporary dilemmas: the relationship between sexuality and destruction; the appalling implications of the appeal of violence and the wellspring urges we share to do injury to others; the deception of appearances and the discomfortingly speedy process by which the familiar morphs into the strange; and above all the role—and challenge—of the artist whose inspiration and vision necessarily derive from shadowy and forbidding interior realms where we are ultimately most (in)human. Ably enhanced by twenty-seven original black and white drawings that are beautifully reproduced to reveal the Goya-esque dimensions of Hafftka's sensibility, these stories—part ironic parable, part fractured fairy tale, part skewed allegory—do not engage or entertain so much as haunt, lingering like the fragmentary recollection of a cryptic dream.Back to Top

08/17/2007

The national newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward printed an excerpt and four reproductions from our recently published book Aleph-Bet by Joshua Cohen (text) and Michael Hafftka (art) on the front page of the Art section and the homepage online.Back to Top